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Signs of a truce spring up in classroom gender wars

For a long time, we were worried about the girls. In early adolescence, they were struggling with low self-esteem and depression. They were less likely to be called on in class and they were less invested in school.

For a long time, we were worried about the girls. In early adolescence, they were struggling with low self-esteem and depression. They were less likely to be called on in class and they were less invested in school.

And then, thanks to concerted efforts in the '80s and '90s to improve curriculum and teaching for girls, they started catching up.

Yet when girls started upending the classroom stereotypes, researchers decided it was actually the boys who needed help – and they had the stats to prove it. It suddenly seemed that compared with their studious female classmates, boys couldn't care less about school.

While the overall dropout rate decreased in Canada through the '90s, boys remained more likely to drop out than girls. And young women were gaining ground in university, accounting for 53 per cent of undergraduate enrollment in 1992-1993 and 58 per cent by 2001-2002.

Boys, it was decided, were getting left behind.

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A plethora of books documented the trouble with boys, from Michael Gurian's The Wonder of Boys in 1996, which argued that boys' and girls' brains are fundamentally different, to William Pollack's Real Boys in 1998, which said boys are more likely to communicate through action and activity. More recent books, like this year's Packaging Boyhood: Saving Our Sons From Superheroes, Slackers and Other Media Stereotypes by Lyn Mikel Brown, Sharon Lamb and Mark Tappan, have explored the cultural context of boyhood.

Others, like Sara Mead, have argued that the boy crisis is bunk and that the real story is not about boys doing worse – it's about girls doing better.

With book and magazine covers pulling parents' heartstrings in one direction and then the next, it's hard to know who needs the help, and why. The science of sex difference is still emerging, and efforts like the Toronto District School Board's plan to launch more single-sex classrooms and an all-boys school have been met with scepticism by researchers who say looking at education only through the lens of gender can be perilous.

When we look at gender first, they say, we risk ignoring all the other factors that shape a child's identity, like race, class, religion, sexuality and upbringing.

Kathleen Gallagher, academic director of the Centre for Urban Schooling at OISE at the University of Toronto, says using gender to think about education can lead to an over-simplification of something that is very complex. "I think we learn so much looking at gender and I think we've made some terrible mistakes looking at gender," she says.

Leonard Sax, founder and executive director of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education in the U.S., says the science of sex difference is still emerging and findings have proven counter-intuitive.

For example, Sax says, some advocates of single-sex schools believe teenage boys and girls, grappling with runaway hormones, should be taught separately because they will be less distracted. But the research suggests that single-sex education benefits boys in kindergarten and Grade 1, 2 and 3 the most, as that is when the learning differences between the "gender-typical" boy and girl are the greatest.

Some of the techniques that work best for boys have long been used in existing single-sex schools, Sax says. For example, all-boys classrooms for 6-year-olds often do not have chairs. "Among the community of boys' schools it is well-known that you don't have 6-year-old boys sitting in chairs because their brains do shut off, and in a co-ed classroom they often get diagnosed with having ADD," Sax say.

But Wayne Martino, a professor in the faculty of education at the University of Western Ontario, is concerned about the kind of masculinity that is reinforced when teachers try to cater to boys: in some classrooms he has visited as a researcher, he found teachers appealing to boys' interests without thinking critically about what they were actually teaching them.

One high school had organized a single-sex program for English, which teachers said allowed them to address the differences between girls' and boys' interests: now, they said, the boys could do "cool, tough things."

Martino had to wonder: "What idea of masculinity are you reinforcing?"

Martino has some reservations about single-sex schools and curriculum. "The stereotypes that we know create problems with boys and men are often the stereotypes that get reinforced when we talk about the boy-friendly curriculum," he says.

Yet Gallagher says boys and girls in co-ed schools learn gender norms much more quickly than in single-sex ones. In the absence of "the look of the boys," girls can flourish and dream up more imaginative possibilities of what they can be. But she says that the stereotypical view of all-boys schools is that they have not been as successful at opening up options for boys, in part because of rigid cultural definitions of masculinity and homophobia.

Sax stresses that the TDSB's plan to open an all-boys school, starting with kindergarten through to Grade 3, is about equal access and choice: not all boys will thrive in a same-sex environment, he says. But some will, and those boys and their parents deserve the option.

Which boys? It isn't who you might expect, Sax says. The studious, quiet boy who doesn't like hockey and football is the best candidate for an all-boys education: at a co-ed school, he might be bullied and ostracized when "gender intensification" kicks in around Grade 6.

Brown says culture accounts for a big part of the problem.

"Being a boy, being a real boy, a real man, now isn't really something that's associated with working hard or doing well in school or being committed to those kinds of things," say Brown. Studying, she says, is associated with being feminine.

Why? "I think it's changed in reaction to girls really moving in and challenging traditional gender roles," Brown says. "I think that's ultimately good for boys and girls because it opens up options for everybody, but I think the media has really picked up on the anxiety around that, particularly for boys, played that to the hilt and played that fully, because that's what media does, and that's what marketers do."

The trouble with boys and girls is much more complicated than the media makes it out to be, Brown says. While girls continue to be targeted with messages of beauty and subordination, boys are increasingly sold a troubling "slacker" image.

But at the same time, kids are increasingly media savvy, Brown says, and adults shouldn't underestimate them.

Perhaps instead, they should listen.

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